Today, many companies perform business-related activities on a variety of different computer systems that can range from a single computer for a small company to a collection of servers and a plurality of user computer nodes for a large corporation. Business-related activities create the backbone of a company's information technology (IT) operation, and can include almost any computer use, including sending and receiving emails, creating and storing documents, hosting web sites, facilitating online transactions, or the like. Therefore, any system errors or failures that are not quickly detected and resolved can percolate throughout the system and can cause great financial hardship to a company. Thus, it is desirable that troubleshooting system errors be fast and efficient. Similarly, a company may want to monitor the performance of its computer systems and networks to prevent errors from occurring, as well as to look for inefficiencies in its system, and/or other opportunities for improvement in their computing system.
Troubleshooting errors and monitoring system performance generally involves analyzing large amounts of data. Stored data can be retrieved and analyzed at or near real time or in the future. However, as noted above, it is desirable for the data to be quickly retrievable to allow for quick analysis and/or to minimize any impacts caused by errors. As a result, it is desirable that data be stored in a way that allows the data to be retrieved quickly, while including enough information to be useful for troubleshooting and/or analysis.
Partitioning the data into multiple files sometimes allows for fast and efficient searching, retrieving, analyzing, and/or maintaining large amounts of data. In some environments, multiple data files can be separated based on a type and/or category of data. However, if any one of the multiple data files is deleted, lost, corrupted, or otherwise inaccessible, then the remaining data may become virtually useless. Therefore, there is a need for fast and efficient data searching and retrieval, as well as maintaining and/or recovering lost data. Thus, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.